


Bullets and Bombs

by HarkerX



Category: The Last of Us
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Complete, Gen, Non-Graphic Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-17
Updated: 2018-08-17
Packaged: 2019-06-28 15:11:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15709755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarkerX/pseuds/HarkerX
Summary: this is a not-so-much-plot wherein Joel thinks he's bad people and Ellie's killed some people and it's the Last of Us, so it does what it says on the tin?I hope!





	Bullets and Bombs

They wake up under a starless sky beside a fire that can't stop burning. He tells her he's got no fight left, but Ellie.

Ellie wonders when she'll wake up, what the world will look like the day she starts thinking of herself as a murderer. There's a line, she knows,

between being good and –

being bad people.

She doesn't think they are. She did once. Then she changed her mind. She'll change his one day, too. But it's a hard thing. It's a hard thing to prove when there are bodies all over the floor.

*

"Say something," Ellie whispers.

Blood drips from her fingers like rain.

Joel shakes his head. He's got one hand on the shotgun even though they both know the ammo is long gone.

Bugs, the kind with too many legs, scurry around in the corners; tuck themselves into places where the boards have lifted. Even they hide from what's outside and what waits there when you're out of time and out of bullets, and you're tired like you ain't ever been to sleep.

This room is like every other room. Boards and nails and the dead and the dead and the dead.

A coffin doesn't have to be person-sized to make you feel like you've been buried.

"You can't stay mad at me forever," Ellie says, and he pulls the shotgun across his lap, one hand on the barrel. Looks down at his raw, bruised knuckles. He doesn't remember hitting anything, or maybe it's just he's hit so many things he's seeing past and future scars.

"I ain't mad," he says, even though he knows she'll think he's halfway lying.

What's true is he ain't mad at her and all she's done is made sure they ain't dead or worse, but seeing her slumped over and barely breathing, the skin of her cheek sewn shut by his shaky, arthritic hands, hurt in places he hasn't felt in a long time.

The whole of the world is a corpse.

"You look mad," she says again.

Joel lets out a sigh. "You're askin' if I'm mad at you and I ain't. You got blood running out of you that ain't yours and we haven't seen a warm meal in going on two weeks, and the hell, Elliegator, all we do is run and all we do is kill and one day we're going to run out of more than just bullets."

He's been calling her Elliegator since that day she sewed him up. Made her his daughter the day he called her _baby girl_ , but Elliegator is a thing he never called Sarah.

Elliegator.

It's how he pretends he's the one taking care of her, but he hasn't been the same since that steel rod went through his gut, missing all the important pieces even though it still tore him up. Aches all the time, now, and the scar looks like claws, bite from a clicker, same mess on Ellie's arm, the one that never gets worse. The one that reminds him every morning is a new morning but nothing has changed.

Never mind the smell of this place. Sweat and sour and shit, too.

Always a good chance of them will be dead by nightfall.

The world is a corpse and they don't have time to bury the bodies. Sometimes they burn them, the rest for worms and flies. Maybe one day he'll dig a hole big enough to settle in. Just the two of them.

When the fight's gone.

When the pain gets too bad.

When waking up hurts more than walking.

*

There's a chair propped up against the door. One leg's already splintered but that's how it is.

They make due.

"She left me," Joel says, a conversation from before he got hurt, from months and months ago, before winter. Before Ellie had to face what being without him might be like.

A guilt he ain't likely to get over or let go.

"Tess?"

The question hangs in the air and Ellie knows she's asked the wrong one. Tess didn't leave them.

She saved them.

_Marble floors and the winding staircase._

_An out of tune piano._

_A palm tree and a setting sun._

Everything was beautiful once, when music was more than bullets and bombs.

"Two years before," Joel says.

Ellie knows it was before his little girl was gunned down. Left to bleed out on a bed of fresh, black earth. Burial black.

"Your wife?" Ellie asks.

Joel thinks she doesn't know her name.

"It's her voice I hear sometimes. Then memories crawl all over me. Infection, or worse. I was better then. A better person," he says. "She just didn't see it."

Better than what?

Hunter. Smuggler. Better than Ellie and her knife and her arrows. Her crowbar. Than his fist and a baseball bat. Bullet after bullet after bullet.

Brick.

"Joel." She scratches at a scab. Curls her fingers in. "You're good _now_."

"We're bad people," he whispers, but it's not his voice.

*

People die.

He lives.

*

 

Joel's asleep, finally. He dreams sometimes, mumbles things, and tells her things she has no right to know.

She leaves him like that, on the old ratty, rotten sofa. A half-torn blanket over his ankles.

There are corpses everywhere.

Blood drips from her fingers like rain.

 

**Author's Note:**

> this is only the 2nd piece  
> of fanfic I have ever written (the first was an Evil!Angel/Xander that lies at the bottom of a friend's drawer somewhere), no beta but I hope the grammar errors are not horrible! :)
> 
> This was inspired by the first trailer for the Last of Us part 2 - with Ellie in the room, and all of those corpses.
> 
> Please let me know if the tags are incorrect or I need to fix anything. Newb problems!
> 
> Thank you!
> 
> -hX


End file.
